The presentation was broadly about Mockingbird, but Mockingbird-specific talk really just occupied the first and last five minutes, everything in between was a discussion of what games are, what their history and place is in human culture, what their potential is as a form of expression, and what elements of that expression are critical in order to make “making” as accessible as possible.

As with previous presentations, the slides by themselves may not be that useful, but for those that heard the presentation the slides should serve as useful reminders.

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Strange Horizons Articles: Searching Under the Rug: Interfaces, Puzzles, and the Evolution of Adventure Games, by Mark Newheiser.

Non-programmers only have data to work with so they solve their design problems by pushing different/more data into a fixed toolset. Programmers solve design problems by writing software. Unfortunately, the way software ecosystems work, the data-side of the equation is less error-prone and is the fastest to iterate on.

One thing we’ve tried to do with Mockingbird is build a game development toolset for non-programmers. Not folks who don’t program (yet), but non-programmers — folks who won’t ever be (by choice) programmers. HTML does the same thing (which Mockingbird is closely modeled after). That’s one of the big reasons “it works.”

I think what Danc is calling theme would be considered aesthetics by the MDA school of thought (which is how I break down interactive design).

I think it’s a bit unfair to compare games to books in regard to breadth of themes. There are more books by a factor of, I don’t know, a million, spanning the last millennium of human civilization? It would be a bit more interesting to compare the range to something filling a more equivalent role in cultural artifacts. You know, our old stand-by: movies!

I’m not going to pretend we’re on par with movies. But if you think about how many movies feature a variation on a cop and a criminal for it’s built-in context you’ll see our clustering is not so crazy. How many war movies? How many romantic comedies?

I do think Danc plays theme too much as a second fiddle to game mechanics. I think this is a trap many game designers fall into, much in the same way I’m sure many filmmakers do the same. We too often build a game from the mechanics outward, or claim that the mechanics and dynamics — the elements unique to our medium — are paramount to the end experience.

But thinking about Mockingbird over the last two years has cemented a very different perspective on theme/aesthetics and games in general. To the broader audience, theme is more relevant than mechanics. As a result, the broader audience is going to bond with your game due to its theme.

That is, if the mechanics and dynamics don’t get in the way. Think about movies: a bad director is noticed while a good director is invisible.

Myst is the ultimate example at one extreme of the spectrum. The mechanics and dynamics are so transparent as to be the fundamentals of web surfing: click on items of interest, maintain some very limited memory of previous items of interest explored, have some vague goal of curiosity pushing you forward. The reason people are drawn into it, though, the reason it made an emotional impact on so many people — besides its perfect timing in regards to presentation technology — is all in its aesthetics, it’s theme.

I have a presentation I’ve given a few times recently that has as its climax the declaration, “replay is a myth!” That’s followed-up shortly with, “gameplay is secondary.” Heretical ramblings? Trying to get a rise out of the audience? No. I believe it to be “the way things are.” I think that’s the reality that the game industry is not accepting as fully as it should.

I listen to regular people describe the idea of their own game. I remember when I “designed” games as a kid. Was I thinking about mechanics? No. I was, at most, mashing together a few similar games to get an idealized set of mechanics. The real “design” is in the aesthetics, the characters, the themes, the reason for playing, the relevancy.

Have I mentioned that I think games should be more relevant? ;-)

The Sporepedia, which serves as a clearing house for the most popular creatures created by players, employs a very clever (and very user-friendly) means to upload/download creatures: they embed the data in the PNG thumbnail of the creature. Instead of having some custom data format that’s opaque to the user (and basically worthless after it hits their desktop except for importing straight into Spore), the user has a traditional PNG that they can trivially view on any modern browser/OS. Embedded in the alpha channel data of the PNG, though, is a bunch of data (about 1K according to some estimates).

Now, this is an old trick, and you can do it “officially” with PNGs in custom chunks or in JPEGs, etc. It’s possible in almost any well-structured format. But it’s a very clever, modern, web way of handling it. It allows for trivial sharing by the user through whatever means they’re accustomed to because sharing an image is an almost universal feature of any collaborative software. So, user’s can attach the thumbs to their e-mail, or post them to their Flickr account, or put them on Facebook or their MySpace page, or send them in an IM.

Consider this inspiration! I’m now officially on the look out for how I can apply this technique to Mockingbird. Embedding the game’s description in its screenshot? Encoding ActionScript into the action icons? I don’t know, but I’m going to find something. And you should, too! Incorporate this feature into your products today!

The term “games” has been around for Really Long Time&tm; (I couldn’t find a reference indicating the date of the origin of the word, buts it has its roots in Olde Englishe&tm;). When we use it today we’re generally referring to video games, board games, card games, sports, etc., i.e. structured (however loosely) activities with interaction, rules and goals. There’s a ton of academic writing on the specific definition that I don’t care to go into… we all know what we’re talking about.

Or do we? The problem with the term games is that for 99% of its history it referred to a formal structure of rules with some goal. But we use it far more liberally these days, particularly in the indie or academic game circles, meaning more generally interactive entertainment (as opposed to films/books/music being passive entertainment).

Randy Smith (EALA) raises this issue in a recent Next-Gen column. Actually, he doesn’t directly raise this issue, instead he raises the issue that we used to have games where the player was allowed to fail, didn’t have a clear path for success, and in general had a much “grayer” experience. He cites Ultima V, which to be honest is cheating, as that game is much more the exception than the rule in regards to “gray” games.

His larger point is that “modern” game design, borrowing heavily from the good designs perfected in the casual market, dictates clear paths to success, objective scoring, concise rules, etc. (you can read his article). His question is whether or not we’re losing something by focusing on these things exclusively, i.e. have we overcorrected and lost something powerful?

The problem is the definition of what we’re doing, what we’re making. If you’re making a game that’s similar to a sport (Quake, practically any FPS with a military-theme, practically any RTS, virtually all casual games, all arcade games, etc.) then all of the elements of modern game design are totally appropriate. On the other hand, if you’re making a game that’s more akin to a simulation or a toy, then all the tenets of good usability, user interface design and accessibility (all different ways of saying the same thing) are critical.

But what if you’re making a game that’s like Ultima V, or Passage, or Super Columbine Massacre RPG, or the Olympic Torch Relay Game? These games are more about the message than the mechanism. The mechanics aren’t elements of structured play, but rather the necessary elements in order to get a specific emotion or point across to the player.

So, we’ve got serious games, casual games, hardcore games, just plain ole games… and message games? These are really our “art” games, games that focus on message or mechanics. They don’t dispense with mechanics, the mechanics are just secondary to the message. And as a result, they often have unoriginal mechanics because it’s not the point.

Note that I’m not dismissing mechanics as important in a “message” game. Cinematography is still critical to good film even if it is secondary to a message in many instances.

What are some examples of message games? I’d love to hear them in the comments. I’m looking for games where the point was the message they conveyed, not the mechanics with which the user interacted with them. I’ll start with the obvious ones I’ve already mentioned: Ultima V (and IV), Passage, SCMRPG… Planescape is probably one, though I’ve never played it. Others?

Patrick keeps asking how one would actually balance it. You could see it as a linear optimization problem (where you’re solving for n variables given m equations/relations). There’s a ton of mathematics research in this field (using computers to analytically solve the systems of equations). The beauty of any matrix of values is that you can run them through transformations (such as neural nets, or min/max algorithms, or even edge detection). It’s just important to remember the relationships. Take values as nodes in a graph, with edges representing relationships between the values.

I’d like to present my own definition of mechanics. I don’t think of it too differently from what Patrick presented; I see mechanics as the tangible, literal, immediate actions (or verbs) the player executes in the game. Classic examples would be run, jump, shoot, move, push, pull. Dynamics would be the effects of the mechanics on the world and the “strategies” that combine multiple mechanics. That may be exactly what Patrick and everyone else is saying, but it helps me grok it better in those terms (so maybe it’ll help someone else as well).

Of course, I may just be being pedantic about the term mechanics, but I see interactive storytelling, or drama games, as simply being more sophisticated dynamics on top of existing mechanics. I really do feel like we’ve developed a healthy enough palette of mechanics for our games; it’s the dynamics that are really too shallow and uninvolved, particularly considering that that’s where the meat is.

I’m sure this is exactly what the academics would say if I was better versed in their writings, but I see mechanics as the necessary instant gratification of interactivity, with the dynamics being the longer term satisfaction of interactivity. That’s why I thought Facade was a failure as a whole: the mechanics were not at all gratifying. How is real-time-typing-hoping-the-parser-understands-and-waiting-for-a-hit-or-miss-reaction a gratifying mechanic? It’s not. Sure, the longer term dynamics of the drama that plays out may be satisfying (when you reflect on it), or the anticipation of what may happen next (when you anticipate it) may be interesting, but the actual mechanics were piss-poor.

Of course, that short term vs. long term “satisfaction” was best summed up recently in this article on the short and long game.

Beyond those few errs, the article perfectly hits home the metaphor point. Particularly the discussion of Shadow of the Colossus, the most succinct explanation of that game as art.

Here’s an interesting article on genre from the Escapist that lead me to make this note in my notebook: “Genres help eliminate unnecessary exposition, they provide a known context for author and audience. Genre is economy.” And by “economy” I meant that genres are an efficient mechanism to reduce the overall information burden on the user (just like metaphors!). They help the user “chunk” across content in a given medium (and even across mediums).

Also, in regards to games being “representational,” the article points to a problem with more realistic looking games… the higher quality, “realer” representation implies to the user a higher fidelity interaction (which never scales as quickly). That’s why old school games feel “right” … their representation equals their interaction.